171w ago - Following up on the rumor from last week that a PlayStation Vita Hello World was achieved through a PSP Save Game exploit, today established PSP hacker wololo has confirmed it and stated that a Half-Byte Loader (HBL) is incoming!

To quote: Last week, an exploit on the PS Vita through the PSP emulator was announced by Mamosuke. The exploit was found by Teck4, and, we won't stress it enough, is a PSP exploit that gives us user mode access within the PSP emulator on the Vita. So this is not a Vita exploit per se, but it's still very cool.

Mamosuke confirmed this with a video a few days ago, and today I was able to confirm the exploit myself as shown in the video below (and I must admit that I spent way too much time working on that basic flame effect). The video below shows the exploit running on both a PSP 1000 and the PS Vita.

Here's also a screenshot since there is not autofocus on my stupid camera.

I spent a good amount of time today confirming some of my hopes that it will be possible to run HBL, at least to some extent, with that exploit. It doesn't mean I have ported HBL to the Vita yet, but I have strong hopes this will be possible. A handful of hackers are working on bringing HBL to the Vita (I won't mention their names here as I don't know if they want to be contacted on the subject), and it should be "relatively" easy to get something to work fairly soon.

(It should be noted though that the Vita is quite sensitive and crashed on me several times when it went into "sleep" mode from the exploit screen from there - am I just paranoid? - it seems it is impossible to reboot the machine for almost 10 minutes, which made me think I had bricked my vita could it be a anti-hacking security? If the console detects several crashes, it takes longer to boot, in order to prevent brusteforce types of attacks?)

I won't discuss any release yet, it doesn't depend on me only (this is, after all, Teck4′s exploit), but if I have my opinion to give on the subject, I would suggest to wait until the Vita is released in Europe and in the US. This gives us some time to polish HBL on this device, and hopefully the vulnerabilities we use to run HBL won't have been patched by then.

This is of course just a challenge with little to no practical interest once we publicly reveal the exploit (in particular, the game used in it), it will be extremely easy for Sony to patch it (or remove the game from the Playstation Store), so probably only a few people will be able to benefit from it but only time will tell, there is still hope, after all, that Sony doesn't care about a tool that allows us to run user mode psp homebrews in a sandboxed emulator.

Now that we know that $ony will remove games without an exploit actually being released, can we troll them by announcing exploits for their most popular games. Eventually they will get sick of losing revenue for no reason, and will delay the time until they pull games. This would potentially give people more time to buy them in the future.

The only problem is communicating which one is real to the community without $ony knowing.

Note for North American readers: that game, despite being available on the US Store, is marked as not compatible with the Vita in the US. People who have bought it in the US and tried to transfer it to their vita have failed as far as I know, which is why a few days ago I recommended people in the US to get a European PSN account.

Seems sony removed the game from all stores... better be quick and get the other game that has the exploit ...FAST !!!